 Alright, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today, so I'm going to talk for a few minutes about weed management and strawberries. And just to put a few kind of qualifiers on here I'm going to summarize what we do in Florida first for weed management so that means everything that I'm talking about is in regards to plastic culture production although a lot of techniques do go beyond that. I'm going to kind of frame this around an integrated weed management program because one thing we have found is that no single tool will solve the problem but you've got to integrate a bunch of them so I'm going to spend a little bit more time on some components of this than others. But we're going to highlight some of the things we found last few years but also highlight kind of the standard practices here in Florida. So to start with, we're going to start with fumigation the vast majority of strawberries in Florida are fumigated. We do have around anywhere from 6 to 800 acres of organic strawberries in the county where I'm at which is Hillsborough County. And that kind of varies depend from year to year depending on the market. But as far as fumigation goes we just completed a management survey of a short while ago. And the most common fumigant in Florida when strawberries is Pickler 60. And as commonly thought of for control of pathogens and nematodes it does provide some weak control as well which I'll talk about a little bit in a minute. The Telone C35 used to be the most common fumigant but it's no longer as common as Pickler 60. And then there are a few growers that use K-Pam or Vat-Pam as well, which its strong point is weed control. The, one of the reasons that we use these combinations of Telone and Chloropikron is because of the fact in terms of weed control they're much more effective when combined. The pictures I'm going to show you next couple of pictures are in tomatoes but you see the same trend in strawberries. So the picture on the left is you're non-treated and you can see nutsedge coming through plastic here. If you add 50 pounds of Chloropikron, if it becomes a pick you actually make the problem worse. And that's because low levels of pick will stimulate nutsedge sprouting. If you're around 200 pounds of pick, well then you've certainly reduced the population compared to a non-treated but you don't get great control. If you look at same picture on the left is untreated, middle left still 50 pounds of pick but the picture on the right now this is 15 gallons per acre one 3D. It essentially doesn't have any effect on nutsedge control on its own. But this is where you really see the difference. Once you combine the pick and the one 3D, you see a really clean bed and it's that combination of products that optimizes weed control and we see that consistently across all crops and that combination improves control. Now, here is a key point though, is it's really weather dependent. So those pictures that I'm showing you where we get really good control of nutsedge, those are fumigated in January in Florida. So that's when the soil is a bit cooler. If you look at this picture on the left is pick or 60 on the right is not fumigated, almost no difference. Those are fumigated in July when it's really hot. So we for weed control when it comes to fumigation, you have to take into account whether cooler, slightly cooler soils are going to give you better weed control just because the fumigate moves through the soil more slowly. We've done a lot of long term fumigation trials the last few years, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time in this because fumigation is not kind of where I want to spend all the time but I do want to point out this picture to give you an example on the left is not fumigated on the right is pick or 60. And again on the left is not fumigated on the right is the Florida three way what we call the Florida three way is a combination. So, this case pick or 60 plus KPM on the top and early in the season you don't see a lot of a lot of difference, but when you look through late in the season you see where we didn't fumigate we just got hammered with disease pick or 60 did fairly well but there's a lot of variability in those plants. If you look at the three way picture on the right you see consistency. Just to show you another picture of how extreme this can be we don't use paladin anymore but this still shows you the difference of the Florida three way versus not. The bottom left hand picture that's paladin pick 21 you can see all those grasses and broadly please growing in there. In the same field, here we have paladin plus KPM you can see how much cleaner it is so consistently, if we have a problem field it's going to be fumigated that has a lot of weeds. The Florida three way or what Georgia they call the Georgia three way that combination gives you the best control and in our studies actually gives you the best economic return as well. Real quick, use combinations if you fumigate cooler temperatures are going to give you better we control with Florida three ways the best in terms of we control as well as economic return, and it's the best in terms of broadleaf and grass control as well. When it comes to herbicides so I'm going to talk about some pre herbicides pre merchants herbicides the ones that you apply before the weeds are up. So in Florida, we're going to talk about herbicides that go underneath the plastic mulch. So, you can have this equipment you can see here which is a bed press which has nozzles on the back which can spray the herbicide directly on the bed immediately before we lay the plastic. This is not a real common practice in Florida not a lot of people are using herbicides under the plastic. It does occur, especially in fields where there are problems with broadly grass weeds. Here is a summary of the most common herbicides used in Florida historically the recommendation was a combination of gold and Devrono. We've moved away from that Chateau is now the most common recommendation. There are a few reasons for that if you look down this is just a few weed species that we have in Florida strawberries. And black medic and Carol the line of geranium are two common ones you see Chateau provides some suppression of those two species, whereas the other two products do not. Generally speaking Chateau persists a little longer and provides really good excellent we control most species a little bit better than goal over goal is also a very good product. If you're wondering why historically would they have mixed goal and Devrono. Well that's simply this next chart shows it Devrono is much better on grasses than Chateau or gold. So that goal plus Devrono mix gave you a better overall we control however Chateau is pretty decent better than goal on grasses. And the last price idea which was admittedly a little over a year ago but it was surprises changed a lot. At the time, Chateau was that around $20 per acre, a gold Devrono mix costs around $120 per acre so a big difference in cost, which is why we kind of moved away from that mix and settled on Chateau is the best option. Unfortunately, neither one of the none of these products work on nutsedge there are no effective herbicides registered for nutsedge control and strawberry. Real quick blurb on flu meoxysm which is the active ingredient in Chateau. This chart right here. We did this trial of short time ago looking at the red labeled rates which is one x all the way up to ridiculously high rates, something that you would never use we were just trying to highlight. What rate would you have to use to see damage. And we did this across a lot of different sites. And you can see I'm pointing at these dots where the one x rate which is three ounces per acre to x rate or the forex rate. This is essentially no damage, you have to go all the way up to eight times the label rate to cause damage to Chateau so it's extremely safe. If you get damage. This is what it looks like Chateau. If you get it on the bed and it comes up through the roots, you can see the browning on the veins. That's what Chateau will do it'll burn the veins up and of course that leaf will die. If you have real high rates on the plant is not likely going to recover. Chateau is Chateau persistence over the season. And I know it was up a little bit here but this is just kind of a little bit of accumulation effect. But basically the reason we like Chateau is because the fact that persists throughout our season so it's a really good product. Just a couple of things. If you're extremely tolerant of Chateau you can apply it. Don't of course but we went up to four times the label rate without any damage. It persists for the whole season. That's a good thing, unless you're going to use that plastic for a second crop then that's could be a problem for you. I have gone to a few fields over the last few years where we saw some Chateau damage and the three bullet points in the bottom here. These are the three reasons we've seen damage. Number one, inadequate agitation in the tank. So Chateau right now is a granular although that formulation is changing. And there's been cases where people didn't agitate it. You release a clump of herbicide in the middle of the field and you get a spot where you get some damage. You have an inexperienced driver who slows down near the end of the row and on adults and you get really high rates near the end of the row that can happen. Or Chateau is supposed to be put on the top of the bed right before you lay the plastic. There's been a few people sprayed on the flat and then pull that bed up and you end up the concentrated lines of herbicide right where the plants are. And that also caused damage. Most of the herbicides that are used in strawberries are used in the row middles. And that's pretty well every single grower does apply herbicides in the row middles in Florida, except for the organic growers which tend to rely on cultivation. We've done a lot of trials and different crops looking at which herbicides are the most effective. This is just a table showing two different seasons and this was weed density in the row middle and you can see Chateau consistently dropped weed density significantly. Dual Chateau and dual and gold fairly well, but not really any any better than Chateau alone. I mentioned dual because it's recently been registered in strawberries in Florida I don't believe it's registered in Alabama. We can use it in the row middle I'm not 100% sure that in Alabama. This is an example of a row middle this is again this particular one was in tomatoes but you can see non-treated versus Chateau application we had your moxal mix started to burn down what was green and big difference so really really good control. This is just a summary of the most effective options and the most common used ones in Florida so a lot of growers will be for transplant we use a combination of aim and Chateau to burn down what's there and to give them residual control or per moxone and Chateau. There are a few will use gold and per moxone and there are a few that use glyphosate after transplant there are a lot of growers use glyphosate or a gram oxone plus Chateau mix that can be sprayed up to fruit set but not after just a couple of things of warning with Chateau if you spray it in row it does persist a long time that's its strength but you can there's a risk of if you have a sandy soil like we do in Florida and you get a lot of wind or you can actually have particles of sand blow up into the fruit if you wait too long to apply that application you get little burn marks. So something you don't want to go too close to when you think you're going to be picking. With glyphosate really common problem is this yellowing this is a little bit of drift when they were spraying it this is very typical of glyphosate around up damage and strawberries where you see the growing points, and even the buds down here all kind of turn of a yellowy twin yellowy twin so you need to be careful for you using glyphosate after transplant careful to do everything you can to minimize drift. I'm going to mention this particular species because we historically did not have ragweed Parthenium in our strawberries it started down south of Florida it has since moved rapidly northward. Now I pretty much see it in all of our strawberry fields, a lot of people mix it up with common ragweed. And really easy to tell them apart if you look at this picture. Ragweed Parthenium has white veins, which common ragweed does not. And common ragweed if you look at the top that's common ragweed a little bit more finely divided leaf. Of course the dead giveaway is these small white flowers look like little puff clouds. And then you have also the vein is he's really sorry the stem is these really prominent veins. So why why we're concerned about ragweed Parthenium and why I'm mentioning it today is we've seen consistently it's moving rapidly northward. And this is what it looks like just a couple of days ago and some fields what they had terminated with herbicides. And you can see the ragweed Parthenium is happily still growing it's very tolerant of glyphosate very tolerant of grimoxone. So it will happily grow and if you don't control those few that are left. This is a pepper field just south of me. And you can see these white lines that is it filling the room it'lls between these rows of peppers, and it's very difficult to manage in strawberries. You only have two options at the moment. One is Chateau again this is the number of weeds per pot so we're looking at the effects of these herbicides on patrolling pre emerge so putting it down before the weed comes up. And this NTC is the non treaty control. And then you see three and six ounces of Chateau give really good control they won't control 100% but they do certainly reduce the density. After that, only options is hand pulling hole in your cultivation there are no herbicides that can be used within a strawberry crop to control the species. We do have some products that are working. And we have spent some time trying working on getting a label for those strawberries know that will be a national label. Once we make a little bit more progress so something to consider with this species. If you do see it in strawberry fields, it tends to start on the edges on the field edges. You need to make sure you remove it. So what do we usually terminate all strawberries at some point, either with a herbicide or with a fumigant herbicide of course being the most common approach, and KPM or VATAM being the ones that are used the most often. So this is just a series of pictures where we looked at different rates of, in this case it's KPM, VATAM basically you get the same data. Looking at how much it takes to kill strawberries. This is at the end of the season, you want to inject KPM and the advantage of doing this is that you not only terminate strawberries but you kill the weeds. You also kill seeds in the soil and pathogens and nematodes. So at 10 gallons per acre, you can see with this red box that perfectly good strawberry control at very low rate of 10 gallons per acre. So if you have a nice clean field and not really any pest pressure and you just want to terminate your crop this could be an option although it's going to be more expensive than herbicides. However, if you go to a part of your field where you have a lot of nut sedge, which is the case in this picture, and I'm just using nut sedge because you can visually see the difference. At 10 gallons per acre, you still have a lot of green weeds growing because you don't, there's not as much spread and there just isn't as you get control in the center, this is with one drip tape but you're not getting control in the bed edges. If you up it to 40 gallons per acre, there's still a little bit of green but you get much much better control and overall we control which means it's going to, if it will kill nut sedge on the edges is killing other pests that also occur on the bed edges. We use this type of technique if we have issues with these diseases like charcoal rotten strawberry this can be an effective way to minimize chat chance of infection the following year. We've done a lot of studies looking at rates. This is a non treated and Peter dishes these black dots this is actually macrofemina growing and Peter dish at 10 gallons per acre you drop it in the center but the side still pretty bad 20 gallons per acre similar story. 30 gallons per acre this yellow is not macrofemina this is a different organism that's not of concern, but you're still not reaching the side at 40 gallons per acre. You start to get much better control so crop termination with a PAM helps with diseases but it also helps with weeds so for example the most common we have in strawberries in Florida's goosegrass. And if you look at this chart here this is the dose of the time potassium or K PAM, this is percent control, and you can see and this is control model the plants this is control of the seeds and this is what's really important is you can get significant a decent kill of a seed bank with a good application of something like K PAM and this rate right around here will be equivalent to 40 gallons per acre, which means that around 40 gallons per acre you're going to get decent control of seeds. Common personally in another way that we have a lot of this would be a very similar trend you can see decent control application K PAM. So, summary 10 gallons per acre will adequately terminate a strawberry crop but you need much higher rates right around 40 gallons per acre if you want to optimize we control and control a lot of pathogens like macrofemina. I do want to mention a follow program so our season of course is a little different than yours but generally speaking we are fumigating and putting beds in in August we plant in September. And we're harvesting through to March or April depending on markets and things like that. That means we have a follow program in from April, all the way through to the following June. Or April, May and June, sometimes in July, and then perhaps part of August so several months there where we have bear ground, a little over 80% somewhere on 85% of the strawberry acreage is cover crop every year. There's a lot of important reasons for us to do that as our wettest time of the year so cover crops helpful things like erosion and helping improve a water uptake for aquifers. But cover crops also do inhibit weeds you can see this picture on the right hand side look taken underneath the canopy. You see hardly almost no weed seeds germinating there so good cover crop inhibits weed growth and suppresses weed seed production. And can emphasize the importance of you know there's all kinds of reasons to cover crop for soil structure for soil health. If there's a weed control, you can really reduce weed growth and prevent seed production with a properly managed cover crop. Now that's true for broadleaf weeds and it's true for grass seeds and actually in some of our long term trials, the presence or absence of a good follow program whether that's cover crops or herbicides was more important than deciding which fumigate to use that just kind of gives you an idea of how important a good follow program is that decision of what to grow when you didn't have strawberries there had a much greater effect than what the number of weeks and even what fumigate you selected. When it comes to nut sedge management cover crops are not a good option. And the reason for that is not said will happily grow underneath the canopy of even the most dense cover crops this is a picture of some him. You can see some hemp which can form an incredibly thick canopy cover nut sedge will continue to happily grow. Now it won't produce as many tubers so you do prevent your populations from getting bigger which is good, but you don't reduce the population so if you have a field with a nuts that's problem. You're much better off to use something like cultivation glyphosate combinations. What you want to do is you want to allow the nuts edge to grow you want to spray glyphosate when you have not said about, I don't know seven inches tall. Certainly before flowers, then you want to cultivate to stimulate more sprouting and then spray again doing that a couple of times will optimize your nuts edge control. So that kind of gives you a summary of the overall approach to weed control. There's one other thing I want to cover here shortly but again I want to emphasize the one thing that we have no for certain is that effective we control over long term is you've got to integrate more than one tool at a time. And one of the reasons that we don't have as many issues with herbicide resistance for example in many specialty crops like strawberries is because we have historically used very integrated weed management program so you want to continue to make sure that you do that. We've last few years we've been doing something kind of fun I'm just going to mention this quickly. Here in Florida we do this practice of relay cropping where we plant a second crop into our strawberries so in this case you can see eggplants growing in strawberries what would happen is somewhere around January which is when we're planting these strawberries. They will come through and they'll plant eggplants cantaloupes or peppers in down the center of the bed so we go two rows of strawberries in one bed with one drip tape down the center so they'll plant a second crop right down the center along the side of that drip tape. And then when it comes near the end of the strawberry season the standard practice right now would be to remove those strawberries by hand and allow that second crop to grow. So the advantage and the reason they do relay cropping versus terminating the strawberries and then planting a second crop is all about timing it allows them to get another crop to market sooner because there's a gap between one one crop ends and another one starts and there's that there's that advantage of timing. The strawberries do provide some protection. So it allows you to get basically it allows you to get two crops in a time period when you normally couldn't get them because part of that time they're growing together. The downside of this approach is as you can imagine hand removal strawberries is labor intensive. So we started developing this shield which is really very simple this is just a prototype. It's basically a triangular sealed shield that you can adjust the width at the bottom. And then on the outside and each side we have nozzles. I'll just show you the back of it as well. And we have at the front is kind of flanged out slightly. What it does is as you pull through the field in this case I'm showing you with eggplants again it pulls the leaves of the eggplant up and into this triangular shield, and then you're spraying the herbicide on the outside to kill the strawberries. So when you pass an open area, you can see this dry line down the center of the bed that's where the herbicide didn't touch, which is and your plant is covered. And then this wet area on the outside both sides that's where the herbicide would have been sprayed. So what this looks like is right here. The strawberries eventually die, and you continue to grow this case we're testing and removal versus herbicide removal in eggplants we've done in cantaloupes and we've also done it in peppers. Not a great idea for cantaloupes, but for peppers and then going upgrade the peppers and eggplants is a great idea works really well. No, no effects on yield. As a matter of fact, if you plant the second crop at the right time you actually get a bit of a yield boost. Just because as I started to mention earlier the strawberries provide some level of protection against cold periods or colder weather or wind. So with that I want to, I know I've done kind of long already and I want to make sure there's any questions there's a chance to ask those but I want to acknowledge I've got a great team down here there's a lot of, there's a lot of this work for me and we are funded by the Florida Strawberry Growers Association as well as the Florida Department of Agriculture.